crew of six videographers to document their every move. For a week. If you’re bent on filming your own reality show, Laucala offers dozens of stage sets you might have all to yourselves. Like the cliff-top aerie Rock Lounge bar. Anywhere else, this bar would be packed. But every evening we stopped in, we were the only guests. Joeli Vuadreu, the lone bartender, was always comically excited to see us. “It gets a bit lonely,” he admitted while polishing the glassware for what must have been the 19th time; there are weeks when Vuadreu hardly sees a soul. Yet each night he shows up, wipes down the teak bartop, cues up the music and lights the torches and the fire pit, on the off chance someone might show up. This sort of practice would drive a corporate efficiency expert nuts—but then Laucala is the furthest thing from efficient. A normal hotel, for instance, might ask if certain projects are worthwhile. Is it a sensible investment of time and resources to plant an orchard of 50 vanilla vines, which now require a Laucala staffer to spend several hours each morning pollinating hundreds of flowers by hand, using a toothpick? But such questions—Is this worth doing? Should we even bother?—do not apply here. At Laucala, the default answer is: Of course.
A N T H O N Y H E A LY, L A U C A L A’S E X EC U T I V E C H E F , showed us
the vanilla-pollination trick himself. It was delicate, frustrating work, like threading a needle covered in sap. It’ll be six months before the beans can be harvested, and another year before they will be ready to use. Healy was leading us on a farm tour, one of Laucala’s most popular activities. The island grows 40 different vegetables (including taro, okra and eggplant), 15 fruits (pineapple, guava, gooseberries, soursop), countless herbs, hydroponic lettuces and microgreens, even coffee, tea and sugarcane. All of them are under organic cultivation. Among the livestock, Austrian Sulmtaler chickens lay eggs with yolks as vibrant as an orange dove’s feathers. The Wagyu herd now numbers nine, up from the original four bought in 2013 for US$150,000. The cattle graze in the lushest pasture you can imagine, under incongruous coconut palms. (While Laucala’s food sustainability is undeniably impressive, the resort is not exactly green: it burns through almost three tonnes of shipped-in oil daily.) From the paddocks we circled around the south coast, bouncing down a dirt track through ever-thickening jungle. This was the untouched side of the island. Two wild goats scampered off into the woods, and Healy briefly considered giving chase. “My crew likes to catch them and make goat curry,” he said, hungrily. Healy pointed to the reef just offshore, where he and his chefs had gone free diving the day before. They’d brought up a dozen lobsters, which would be on the dinner menu that night.
T H E F O O D I S A H I G H P O I N T. I loved the fresh-caught tuna sashimi at Beach Bar, breakfasts of silky congee and those golden-yolked eggs, and the quasi-secret, six-seat teppanyaki restaurant that clings to a cliffside above the sea. All five restaurants really do stay open every night, 98
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An orchard of 50 vanil a vines requires a Laucala staffer to spend several hours each morning pollinating hundreds of flowers by hand, using a toothpick even when only one couple is in residence. Guests can also dine in their villas, and some do so for every meal. But we kept returning to Seagrass, Laucala’s Thai restaurant, run by chef Piak Sussadeewong, formerly of the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok. Piak’s prawn salad with palm hearts and fiery gai toey (fried chicken with pandanus leaves) were among the best renditions I’ve had. Days at Laucala are spent snorkeling among the hawksbills, paddling the lagoons on an outrigger canoe, and game-fishing on the Riviera Flybridge yacht. There are hikes to nearby waterfalls and long rides along the beach on Laucala’s resident Fijian horses, a sturdy crossbreed of Clydesdale and Australian Thoroughbred. And if you want something more adventurous, there’s always the submarine. The DeepFlight Super Falcon Submersible is more fighter jet than sub, in both looks and performance. It is nearly seven meters long and shaped like a Star Wars X-Wing—the pilot sits in front; you ride in back, like R2-D2. It can dive to 120 meters. It can barrel-roll. It can go six knots per hour, which isn’t all that fast, but feels so when you’re flying—the only word for it—through the ocean, darting among the coral like a high-precision drone. Now, the Super Falcon is launched from shore using a beach-loader, and travels only inside the reef at an average depth of eight meters. But Laucala is considering buying a new boat that could launch the sub in the water, allowing for excursions well beyond the reef—to the famous Great White Wall, for example, one of Fiji’s top dive sites. It’s no surprise that Laucala is incredibly wellconceived and well-run—though its understated style does come as a surprise. (At resorts with unlimited budgets, decorative restraint is rare.) I’d arrived expecting something absurdly over-the-top. I was prepared to be disoriented, if not outright put off, by the idea of so much